Football Rehab

Cristianolization- The impact of Cristiano on player appreciation

2021-01-10T08:38:00.000-05:00

By Dr3

I used to be a Cristiano-hater when he was at United. I became a Cristiano-admirer when he went to Madrid. Since then, I've become a Cristiano-apologist and sympathizer. It's not his fault; he's the victim. His ascent in football took place during football's own gradual analytics-renaissance. A crazy time when 'drive', 'vision', and 'mentality' were no longer enough to describe a player's quality. We were witnessing two statistical outliers peaking at the same time, which bred a different type of fan, a different type of coverage, and a different appreciation was needed. Social media was also changing connectivity, and bringing a brevity and wit to assessment that maybe hadn't quite existed before. It brought a reductionism; show me your numbers.

The *generational player 'once removed' was Ronaldinho. Folks who saw him play would be forgiven for naming their first-born daughter Ronaldinha, and sporting a r10 headband to meemaw's funeral. Yet, the assessment of his talent had so little to do with his output. He was all joy, and vision, and audacity, and tenacity, and flair, and skill. In what felt like two weeks later, it was all about goals and assists. Goals and assists in big games. Goals and assists while winning a trophy. Passes, unsuccessful dribbles, and km covered. Today? It's expected goals (xG), and Lukaku>R9.

*What is a football generation? I have no idea.

Courtesy of Squawka

There was something so freakish about watching Lionel Messi run with the ball. It didn't make sense. It still doesn't. He's so good that some sort of intrinsic fight/flight reaction kicks in to ensure that you qualify your praise. You don't want to be that giddy while watching a man run around on the grass. Can he do it without Barcelona? Can he carry a team to a World Cup though? Can he header? Human nature created what was next. Compare and contrast. Compare by contrast. Sure he can dribble, but is he outperforming the other top players. The other top player?

Up steps the perfect caricature for our ailing brains. A Cr9/Cr7 shaped plug to fill the chasm. Look at the numbers. Cristiano the player was being molded by Pellegrini and then-Mourinho into an assassin of sorts. He didn't dribble as much anymore. Didn't care to be Beckham-ish anymore. The work started by Ferguson was being ruthlessly improved upon. His charge; score goals. And sure as shit, he did. Bucket loads of them.

Cristiano the caricature? Unbeknownst to him, he had changed the way football players were being described and appreciated. It was the creation of the goal-machine in our minds, that led to further and further reduction of players into their output. Never mind that Cristiano is abundantly more than 'just' his goals. His touch is incredible. His passing incisive. Turning on the ball? Top class. In our minds though, he's all penalties and diving headers.

It was Cristiano, the riposte. Him as a fundamental demonstration of efficiency in numbers. Him, that brought in a new way of discerning between players. Fans need not watch full games to gain appreciation anymore; highlight reels and the underlying stats should suffice. This is not a diatribe on analytics. Or even a comment on 'new' fans or anything. Maybe just a lament on the impact Cristiano's own stupendous body of work unintendedly had. I wonder how a player like Ronaldinho would be appreciated today? I wonder who of the post-millennials will be naming their daughter Lionela and Ronalda?

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The problem with VAR

2020-01-13T17:08:00.003-05:00

By Dr3

Imagine being asked to bake a cake using a recipe. An oddly named recipe called the "LGTO"; not to be mistaken with the LOTG (Laws of the Game), the GOT (Game of Thrones) or the LOTR (Lord of the Rings). The LGTO contains all sorts of subjective units of measure like man-handfuls, woman-pinches, beer-jugs, etc. Does it matter that you have a pipette to ration your ingredients and bake that cake?

The problem with VAR (Video Assistant Referee), not to be mistaken with aRV (A Recreational Vehicle), is that there is no problem with VAR.

IFAB LOTG: ~~not to be mistaken with BILFGOAT~~ The acronyms are getting out of hand

The 'problem' VAR is facing in it's infancy, is that the laws haven't been adjusted to take advantage of it's obvious benefits. Offside? It should probably be worded just as balls going over lines are; the entire player should be offside. The offside rule was probably originally needed to prevent tactics of booting the ball to infinity as a form of counter-attacking, and teams essentially sitting in the lowest of defensive blocks to create the 'transition'. Being imprecise in definition also served as a built-in protection for the linesman; they could get pretty good at judging at least some portion of a player being past the last defender. The rule was probably not intended to measure Raheem Sterling's armpit or whatever else "can be used to score".

Handball? Maybe mimic the NFL and introduce a replay process that puts the onus on the coaches to be pedantic. Two decision-challenges per game per team. Handball probably needs to be defined as the player moving their hands towards the ball. Maybe only if the review shows that they did move their hand towards the ball in the box, there's a penalty kick. For all else (outside/inside the box and incidental handballs), indirect free-kick and of course the referee judges discipline.

Stopping the flow of the beloved game? Giving kids foamy-mouth nightmares because they celebrated a goal prematurely? Maybe limit how many angles and how many times the review is allowed to be done. Three angles in 15 total seconds once play is stopped, and 5 additional seconds to make a decision. Anything more only serves confirmation bias. Of course, and this should go without saying; show everyone what's being reviewed, and let the referee speak on the loud speaker. Again, just as in the NFL.

The 'problem' with VAR is that it is attempting to make subjective rules objective. It is not that the replay in of itself is inherently incapable. Your man-handful, and my man-handful are not the same, unfortunately. The part of the body that "can score" doesn't make sense. In the phrase "clear and obvious error", only the word "and" is not a subjective term. It's called a Gauge R&R in my world. Even the same referee would not make the same call for the same incident in the same match 90% of the time. Much less for a different referee, in a different match. The idea that it therefore needs to be precise to an armpit, is a bit pretentious in that context.

Imagine if goal line technology was supposed to discern the 'majority' of a ball over a line. Not a projection/graphic of a perfectly spherical ball either. The actual not-so-spherical ball in a video still.
It would probably be very contentious, no?

It's not a crisis. VAR is a good idea that is still working through the kinks. So while we hawk-eye, and bullet-time for body parts as if in the Matrix, unless we redefine some of the LOTG, there'll continue to be travesties to humanity seen wherever first, every damn week.

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Racism “in football”

2020-01-05T12:02:00.001-05:00

By Dr3

German player Anthony Rudiger

There's been an uptick in ~~alleged~~ racist abuse towards players in recent months in European football. It's been said but it bears repeating; football is an extension of greater society. It doesn't exist as some sort of panacea. It's not a wonderland of fairness and meritocracy. That is the pipedream of a child, or a people in denial with little to no empathy. Whatever your version world over of Math 101, you learned about sets and subsets. All walks of life; from the police departments, to the housing boards, to the education boards and schools, your occupation, to the gas station workers, are subsets of our society. Whatever your journey in life, you've also learned that life is anything but fair, at least as the word was taught to us as children. Racism exists everywhere.

Correcting racism or any harmful bias requires personal accountability and is something that people quite frankly are horrible at doing. Defense, especially in response to some sort of fear, seems to be our one shared innate instinct across cultures and status as well. A conversation about a racist thought or act by a person, quickly devolves into the entirely more abstract, more defensive, less accountable, conversation about that person being 'a racist'. Imagine murdering someone for the 'first time' in your life. There's no doubt that you murdered them. You did it, down to the fitted bloody gloves. But is there degree or nuance around you being a murderer?

Most racist incidents in European football have involved black players. It's not a coincidence. It's a majority non-black world in Europe, for which trading in African slaves was ubiquitous at some point in the past. It's also a non-black world in which being 'a racist' elicits imagery of Nazism. It does not involve the imagery of a plantation, a ship of human beings in chains and feces, or ~~mobs~~ regular non-black citizens mobilizing to lynch or otherwise terrorize black people. It does not elicit imagery of the victims of terror being ascribed with the traits of the terrorists themselves; imagine the people who were in bondage, and raped, and killed, and continue to be oppressed, being more associated with terror upon fellow humans than the terrorists/oppressors themselves. It does not elicit imagery of intentional legislated unequal access to education, or health, as a subset of access to wealth, post-slavery.

If you add to this, a general apathy, and now a dilution of integrity (I believe it's called post-truth), then it's no wonder it seems that racism is back, like it never left. It's an ironic time that we live in. We want to be accepting of more; beyond conventional right's and wrong's. We want to do away with these traditional dichotomies. But borne out of this need to not define things in the old binary way, there's also been a denunciation of such a thing as truth, giving air to the fire of extremism. Removing nuance in the process along the way somehow ("Cancel Culture"). Creating even larger dichotomies than there have been for quite some time. Everything is valid and invalid with equal merit. All insults are created equal. Everything is acceptable and unacceptable with the greatest malevolence. Imagine demanding an apology at the suggestion that one of you among the 60,000 in a stadium may have made racist chants towards a player. Imagine it for second. Could it be because of how repulsive it is, to be thought of as 'a racist'? The ignominy of being potentially labelled a racist matters more than potentially being racially abused.

Empathy and accountability. One for allaying fear of being labelled, and one for genuinely taking steps to learning and doing better. Instead of being fearful of what players walking off the football field could mean for sport, maybe consider that people go to war for months and have PTSD that affect their life and their children's lives for at least a couple generations. Do you think the descendants of slaves and those witnessing family members' or hearing about and experiencing any number of injustices may have PTSD related issues in raising their children? Is it hard to imagine what being reminded of your perceived class as a subhuman may do to a person maybe trying to raise a generation with hope? Is it really unjust that 'non-blacks' be labelled as having been 'racist' towards 'blacks' both today and in the past as a collective?

So no, there's not a racism "in football". But football can take personal accountability through empathy. It's not difficult to be accountable if you can stifle your pity for the 'non-racists'. Stifle the urge to sabotage actually doing something by virtue of it's difficulty in a societal context. Two broad ideas; affect points, and close stadiums. That's it. There's fan personal accountability as well. If you hear someone in a stadium making racist chants, tell them to shut up, or go tell an authority figure. Record it on your phone and upload it (anonymously if you must) to YouTube, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, and the list goes on forever. For the authorities it's even simpler. If a club does not investigate racism and punish accordingly (and this should be severe; lifetime bans etc) based on your established guidelines, you will. If evidence is found, automatic stadium closure for two games, and an automatic 3 - 0 loss for the team for the matches with the incidents. Repeat offenses result in point deductions in addition to original punishment. It's not harsh. It's ridiculous to think that it is harsh. How readily are managers punished for their words? Does it take actual deaths in a stadium to bring action? There's the media too. Beyond enjoying the post-truth times with cheap clicks and caricaturing, the media can actually put pressure on the authorities to do more in a way no one else can. It's not "alleged" if you have a video of it, why so cautious? How could the same journalists that seem to enjoy a Manager being fired, or enjoy labeling players as flops, struggle to decisively label something as racist? It does not matter that it's a "handful" of people amongst a sea of 'non-racists'. It should not be spoken about for one week then shelved. It didn't go away. Language matters in beseeching action. Racism didn't sprout into existence out of nothing. It's not going to disappear by conversations and 'education' instantaneously either. It takes all people choosing, continuously, to be accountable for ending racism through their actions. Football is better placed than general society for exhorting that choice.

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